Splinter

I have a splinter stuck in my leg—the most improbable place, the back of my right thigh, in the only meat I can’t manipulate forward or backward enough to see the splinter with my own eyes. Even holding a mirror to the underside of my leg and angling it upward is difficult and I can only catch glimpses of it, the part of the splinter I haven’t been able to dig out.

I acquired the splinter sliding across a wooden bench in an outdoor courtyard bar in Lawrence, Kansas—the bench had been stained dark once, like a church pew, though years of backpack zippers and undergrads carving their initials into the wood had scuffed the bench up pretty badly. I only thought about the bench’s jagged edges later.

I was wearing fishnet tights. I had just given a reading to support my most recent book, A Calendar Is a Snakeskin, a memoir about the year I tried to pay attention to the signs in my life pointing me toward the person I thought I was meant to become. The book was a catalog of symbols which were metaphors which were also facts I kept construing as symbols—a big old cycle of the truths I was hoping to find, which then led me back to the very truths I was actively avoiding. I had read aloud one of the sections about my siblings, which I only chose because I knew no one from my family would be present at the reading. It was a way to salve the hurt of my estrangement from my sister—an estrangement which began, partly, over a year earlier due to the fact that I had even written the book. Any approach I took to Snakeskin’s sibling-specific content—which she hadn’t read—was irrelevant. She didn’t trust me. Reading aloud what I’d never brought myself to say directly to my siblings should have been like the relief of extraction, but something still throbbed under my skin.

Out after the event with my fellow readers and pressmates, I slid across the bench to settle in for conversation and felt something stab my leg like a sharp bite. My dress was voluminous enough I was able to slide my hand underneath my dress without anyone noticing I was groping my own leg; I kept chatting pleasantly as I tried to scrape out of my thigh whatever had gotten caught in my skin. Something came out under my fingernail, but I could tell it wasn’t enough.

I went to the bathroom, one of those dingy, tight bar bathrooms where I could barely elbow enough space to heft my dress up to see my leg. I pulled down my tights to discover the splinter had ripped a bigger hole between the holes of my fishnets. I used the child-technique to try to remove the splinter—the technique you use on a playground when your kid falls in the bark mulch and you don’t have access to tweezers—putting one fingernail on the far side of the splinter and bearing down while trying to drag the splinter forward to force it through the rip in the skin. I clawed out a chunk in the bathroom, but I rotated my thigh to check and I could see there was still black inside. I squeezed hand sanitizer from my purse onto my palm and rubbed it over the wound—stinging, but disinfecting.

I returned to the booth and carefully sat down this time, thinking about how if I’d been wearing jeans—instead of a dress which was apparently so short it didn’t even cover my mid-thigh—there was no way the splinter would have ripped through the denim. I wasn’t going to ask one of my pressmates to watch as I pulled my dress up to reveal my impaled upper thigh, wasn’t going to ask one of them to tell me if the splinter looked as bad as it felt, certainly wasn’t going to ask someone to touch me and remove what, arguably, I had put there. Maybe it was a test of some sort, seeing how many of my decisions I could own. I smiled and nodded along for the next hour and a half, surreptitiously sneaking a hand down through the bell of my sleeve under my dress to intermittently pick at my thigh without anyone noticing, but I could still feel a bulge under my skin, throbbing.

I was so relieved, when the group finally returned to our shared Airbnb, that I bolted into the bathroom and got naked in front of the mirror, manipulating my thigh around so I could see the splinter more clearly. Of course I didn’t have tweezers with me, of course the rental did not have any. I realized I was going to have to use my fingernails like pincers and so, after I soaped the burning wound up, I dug into my skin on both sides of the gash, trying to squeeze the wood shard out. I could see it in there, a black chunk shoved so far underneath the skin I could not reach it. I tried digging around the open site, wincing and grimacing and biting my teeth together, but I still could not get the splinter.

My brother had texted me the day I arrived in Lawrence and asked me to call him because he had finished reading my book and “had questions about some of the things in it.” I understood my sister would not call me. One of my pressmates had said, sitting in the outdoor bar courtyard while I dug at my splinter, that they were impressed by my willingness to be honest about sibling relationships, calling siblings one of the touchiest things to write about. The statement surprised me because, after all, one of my pressmates had written a book about giving a child up for adoption and another had written about meeting his birth sister—both of which seemed like much bigger emotional landmines than my little book about how I felt like my siblings did not want me in their lives as much as I had wanted them in mine.

When I left Lawrence the next morning, I called my brother on the drive home to Omaha, knowing the conversation was inevitable. For half an hour, he said very hard things for me to hear, questioning why I would even want a relationship with him after how I’d described his actions, dismissing my interjected attempts to point out the places on the page where I’d excavated my behaviors and described my remorse and shame over how reactionary I’d been. I tried to explain that I’d written the book partly to understand why I’d stuffed my mouth with cotton to hold in the venom; why I hadn’t been able to tell my siblings directly that I’d been hurt because it felt too vulnerable; why the book was both a document of my grief and growth toward a tender, tentative question to my siblings: did they still love me, because it ached when I thought they’d boxed me out; I loved them so much. He said it didn’t really feel that way to him. The splinter, under my thigh, throbbed the whole time.

I get home, go to my bathroom, and I try to pry the splinter out again, this time using the sharp and angled tweezers I keep in a cup with my makeup brushes, but even with my jeans around my ankles I can’t spread my legs far enough apart to pull my thigh far enough forward to see what I’m doing. I make my husband come and look at the red spot, dark in the middle, to confirm that he can see what I can’t. I go out to my backyard and pull off a leaf of plantain, masticating it before pressing the plantain over my splinter and bandaging the plantain into place. I keep both the plantain and the bandage on my leg, undisturbed, for twenty-four hours, enough time for plantain to do its usual effective work of forcing an invader out of the skin and up to the surface. The splinter remains, though it looks diminished to me when I take the bandage off. But how would I really know; I haven’t been able to look at the splinter head-on this whole time? I repeat the process for another twenty-four hours, more plantain applied to suffocate the wound and force the splinter to the surface to breathe, but when I remove the bandage the next day, the splinter remains buried deep in my skin—though less dark, I think.

I try picking at the wound site again with tweezers, but that just opens up the wound, which means it takes another day to close. I am wasting day after day, certain I can remove the splinter myself, unwilling to either make an appointment with a doctor or ask my husband if he will try to scrape it out. My injury, my shame, I caused it. Every time I sit down, I can feel the lump of the splinter under my thigh, like a pimple or a scab. The splinter doesn’t exactly hurt, but it’s noticeable. It’s still present. I train myself to get used to the feeling. 

There had been a lunar eclipse one week before the splinter lodged itself in my thigh. During the eclipse, I had written my estranged sister an email explaining why I hadn’t been able to talk to her for over a year. She wrote back quickly and dismissed my explanation out of hand, telling me I wanted her to be a ghost in my life. I told her not to misunderstand the situation, that she had created it too, but when she responded saying something about how I was twisting the circumstances into whatever fodder I wanted to write into my next book, I did not read beyond the email preview. I did not open the email itself.

A dark spot, a bump beneath my thigh I cannot see but I know is there, one I have put there.

The Moon card keeps jumping out of the tarot deck when I shuffle, a reminder that in my interior, something knows what I am not ready to know yet and will only reveal itself to me when I am. Something must work its way through my body to the surface.

I try to act like everything is normal, busying myself with the ephemera of daily life. I host a party for my local friends, splinter in my thigh. I do a phone interview for my book, splinter in my thigh. I travel to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving and sit at the dining table when my mother accidentally mentions to one of my friends that my sister is going to be traveling to visit my brother and his family in two months. Ah, there is the reveal, the splinter ever-present in the thigh of my book: my siblings still make efforts to spend time with each other, but not with me.

I take my middle daughter to a movie, splinter in my thigh. I give another reading at a local bookstore to celebrate Willa Cather’s 150th birthday, splinter in my thigh. My kids and I go shopping for Christmas presents and bake too many sugar cookies and haul up the boxes to decorate our tree and I address all our holiday cards but cannot send one to my sister because she never told me her new address, splinter in my thigh.

It has been over a month since I acquired the splinter, and I am watching a Christmas movie with my children when I absentmindedly scratch the lump and it comes off. I can feel it in my hand, down inside my pajama pant leg—something has gone and it has left my thigh smooth. A flake, a something I released and let go. I don’t bother to bring it into the light, to confirm it was really the splinter. All I know is that the lump is gone, though I do not check my thigh for confirmation. It is so difficult to pull it forward. A month passes, and I still feel phantom aches out of nowhere on the splinter site, sometimes, when I am standing, which I had never felt even when I knew the splinter was still inside me. Something may have worked its way out, but I am not brave enough to make certain.